Claim OwnershipThe Israel Lobby Con EXTRA! Podcast
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IsraelLobbyCon Extra! is an online initiative created in 2020. It advances the IsraelLobbyCon.org mission and provides key expertise, analysis and global outreach opportunities between our annual National Press Club conferences.
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Kathy Drinkard is a retired teacher and elementary school counselor. She has long been concerned about the suffering in the Palestinian territories and has been involved with her church on the issue for more than a decade. She has traveled to the region four times, most recently in the fall of 2018, a trip she helped plan. During her second trip, she spent 10 days in Nablus visiting an Anglican congregation that is in partnership with her church. Her third trip was to participate in a seminar, “Faith in the Face of Empire,” sponsored by the Reverend Dr. Mitri Raheb and Bright Stars of Bethlehem.
She currently is chair of the Ministry for Middle East Peace and Justice at Grace Presbyterian Church in Springfield, VA.
James Metz retired after a career in information technology—working in both the public and private sectors. In 2013, inspired by a community discussion of Sandy Tolan’s book, The Lemon Tree, Metz and his wife Suzanne Hallberg joined with another couple to co-found Richmonders for Peace in Israel-Palestine (RPIP).
In 2016, RPIP joined forces with Freedom2Boycott-Virginia—now known as the Virginia Coalition for Human Rights (VCHR)—to lobby against and defeat anti-BDS legislation that was introduced in the Virginia General Assembly. Metz and Hallberg live in Richmond, VA.
Paul Noursi has been active with the Virginia Coalition for Human Rights (VCHR) since its founding in 2016. He is also active with several other organizations working for peace and justice in the Middle East, including the Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace, the New Dominion PAC, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the Arab American Democratic Caucus of Virginia. He was also a Barack Obama Delegate to the Virginia State Convention in 2008, a Bernie Sanders Delegate to the Virginia State Convention in 2016, and he has served on various Get-Out-the Vote and Democratic campaigns.
Noursi has lived and traveled extensively in the Middle East, including Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon. He has a BS in Civil Engineering, an MS in Engineering Management, and is a licensed and practicing civil engineer with wide-ranging experience in land development and public works in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC.
Brad Parker, Esq. is Senior Adviser, Policy and Advocacy at Defense for Children International. Parker specializes in issues of juvenile justice and grave violations against children during armed conflict, and leads DCIP’s legal advocacy efforts on Palestinian children’s rights. Parker regularly writes and speaks about the situation of Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Before joining DCIP, Parker worked as a legal advocacy coordinator and staff attorney at MADRE, a New York-based international women’s rights nonprofit organization. He was the 2010-2012 Human Rights Clinical Fellow at the International Women’s Human Rights (IWHR) Clinic at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law, where he conducted fact-finding investigations, implemented advocacy projects and authored reports on a range of issues affecting women in Guatemala and post-earthquake Haiti.
Parker is a graduate of the University of Vermont and earned his J.D. from the City University of New York School of Law.
Saqib Ali served as a Democratic Party member of the Maryland House of Delegates. He represented District 39 from January 10, 2007 to January 12, 2011.
Since leaving the legislature, he cofounded Freedom2Boycott in Maryland, an organization of Palestinian Solidarity activists dedicated to preserving their constitutional right to boycott Israel and Israel's settlements.
Ali is a professional software engineer. In January 2019, Ali sued Maryland's Governor Larry Hogan and Attorney General Brian Frosh over the state’s anti-boycott executive order. The anti-boycott measure, which denies government contracts to businesses that boycott Israel, was issued in 2017 after similar legislation repeatedly failed to pass through the state legislature.
Martin McMahon is a graduate of Fordham Law School, and an experienced litigator who has tried cases all over America.
He has spent a number of years with the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, where he oversaw significant litigation matters in the Southern District of New York and in the Second Circuit.
He has had private practice experience, having been with Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and Proskauer, Rose, Goetz & Mendelsohn.
He set up his own law firm many years ago and is one of a handful of attorneys who has secured three punitive damages awards. He is dedicated to advancing the interests of the proverbial underdog – in this case, Palestinians, who the world has largely forgotten about and deem irrelevant.
James North is an independent writer, based in New York City, who has been reporting from Africa, Latin America and Asia for 44 years.
He is also a contributing editor at Mondoweiss, the website that covers “News & Opinion About Palestine, Israel and the United States.”
Over the years, North has written for The Nation, In These Times, and many other publications. He is also the author of Freedom Rising, a first-hand look at apartheid in southern Africa.
You can follow James on X @jamesnorth7
Grant Smith is the director of the Washington, DC-based Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep). He is the author of the 2016 book Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby Moves America and Divert! Numec, Zalman Shapiro and the Diversion of U.S. Weapons-Grade Uranium Into the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program (2012).
Smith has also written two histories of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). America’s Defense Line: The Justice Department's Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government and Foreign Agents: AIPAC from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal.
Smith’s reports about the Israel lobby and Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to reveal official U.S. policy on Israel’s nuclear program appear frequently in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Antiwar.com news website.
Ali Abunimah is a journalist and the co-founder and executive director of the widely acclaimed The Electronic Intifada, a nonprofit, independent online publication focusing on Palestine.
A graduate of Princeton University and the University of Chicago, Abunimah is a frequent speaker on the Middle East, contributing regularly to numerous publications. He is the author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006) and The Battle for Justice in Palestine (Haymarket Books, 2014).
Abunimah has been an active part of the movement for justice in Palestine for 20 years, and was the recipient of a 2013 Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship.
Walter Hixson is the author of a half-dozen books on the history of U.S. foreign relations. He has taught history for 36 years and is currently distinguished professor of history at the University of Akron.
Hixson’s books include American Foreign Relations: A New Diplomatic History (Routledge, 2016); American Settler Colonialism: A History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 2008); Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (St. Martin’s, 1997); and George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (Columbia University Press, 1989).
Hixson’s forthcoming book, Israel’s Armor: The Role of the Israel Lobby in the History of the Palestine Conflict (Cambridge University Press, Spring 2019) is a groundbreaking history, using untapped source material, about Israel and its U.S. lobby’s impact on American foreign policy since 1948.
Delinda Curtiss Hanley is news editor and executive director of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, a 76-page nearly monthly magazine with the largest circulation of any Middle East related publication in North America. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, features insightful analysis of the political, economic, and historical realities of the U.S.-Middle East relationship. Each colorful issue is packed with special reports on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in Iraq, current Middle East issues and grassroots activism in the U.S. and abroad. The magazine is important to every Muslim- and Arab-American organization because it is the only publication that reports on every group's symposiums, lectures, dialogues and activities. The magazine also focuses on U.S. lobbying groups involved in crafting U.S. policy (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 2024).
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson's last position in government was as Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff (2002-05). He previously was associate director of the State Department's Policy Planning staff under the directorship of Ambassador Richard N. Haass, and member of that staff responsible for East Asia and the Pacific, political-military and legislative affairs (2001-02).
Before serving at the State Department, Wilkerson served 31 years in the U.S. Army. During that time, he was a member of the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College (1987-1989), special assistant to General Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-93), and director and deputy director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia (1993-97). Wilkerson retired from active service in 1997 as a colonel and began work as an adviser to General Powell. He has also taught national security affairs in the Honors Program at George Washington University. He is currently distinguished visiting professor of government and public policy at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia and working on a book about the first George W. Bush administration.
1Jefferson Morley is a veteran Washington investigative reporter and the author of the 2017 St. Martin’s Press book, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton. The book sheds new light on Angleton’s close relationship with Israeli intelligence, citing such cases as Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS Liberty and the diversion of U.S. government-owned weapons-grade uranium from Apollo, PA to Israel in the 1960s.
A native of Minneapolis, Morley attended Yale University and worked as an editor at The New Republic, The Nation and Spin Magazine before joining The Washington Post in 1992 where he worked for 15 years. His reporting has also appeared in The New York Review of Books, Reader’s Digest, The New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, and Salon.
Morley is the author two other books, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA, and Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835.
Ali Abunimah is a journalist and the co-founder and executive director of the widely acclaimed publication The Electronic Intifada, a nonprofit, independent online publication focusing on Palestine.
A graduate of Princeton University and the University of Chicago, he is a frequent speaker on the Middle East, contributing regularly to numerous publications.
He is the author of One Country, A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse and The Battle for Justice in Palestine.
He has been an active part of the movement for justice in Palestine for 20 years.
He is the recipient of a 2013 Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship.
Gideon Levy is a columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz, which he joined in 1982. He spent four years as the newspaper’s deputy editor and is currently a member of its editorial board. He is widely considered the “dean” of Israeli journalism—as well as “the most hated man in Israel.” As Levy has written, “Treating the Palestinians as victims and the crimes perpetrated against them as crimes is considered treasonous.”
Levy writes the weekly Twilight Zone feature, which covers the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza over the last 30 years, as well as political editorials for the newspaper. His columns about politics, money, how Israel's military occupation is changing Israeli society and about U.S.-Israel relations are widely read and discussed around the world.
Levy was the recipient, with Palestinian pastor Mitri Raheb, of the 2016 Olof Palme prize for their “fight against occupation and violence.” He has also received the Peace Through Media Award, at the 2012 International Media Awards; the Euro-Med Journalist Prize for 2008; the Leipzig Freedom Prize in 2001; the Israeli Journalists’ Union Prize in 1997; and The Association of Human Rights in Israel Award for 1996.
His book, The Punishment of Gaza, was published in 2010 by Verso Publishing House in London and New York. Video of Levy’s presentation at our 2015 conference was translated into Arabic and has gone viral, receiving more than 200,000 views.
Thomas Getman is partner in a private consulting group that specializes in international, United Nations and Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) affairs and university seminars, on U.N. Reform and humanitarian interagency partnership building. He was World Vision’s executive director for international relations until March 1, 2009. He managed World Vision’s liaison activities with the U.N. and the World Council of Churches and was responsible for diplomatic relations with U.N. member missions in Geneva and with countries on sensitive tax, staff and protocol negotiations. He served until 2009 on the board of principals for the U.N. Deputy Secretary General for Emergency Relief in the U.N. Office of the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) as chair of a premier NGO consortium, the International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA).
Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi is the director and senior scholar in the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas; associate professor of Ethnic Studies/Race and Resistance Studies; and affiliated faculty in Sexuality Studies graduate program at San Francisco State University. She is a co-founder and editorial board member of the Islamophobia Studies Journal for which she is co-editing the forthcoming special issue on “Gender, Sexuality and Racism.” She is co-author of Mobilizing Democracy: Changing U.S. Policy in the Middle East; and co-editor of Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence and Belonging, winner of the 2012 National Arab American non-fiction Book Award; American Quarterly Forum on Palestine and American Studies (2015); and a special issue of MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies. Her work has appeared in 7 languages (Arabic, English, Farsi, French, German, Italian and Spanish in academic journals (International Feminist Journal of Politics; Gender and Society; Radical History Review; Peace Review; and Journal of Women's History); anthologies (This Bridge We Call Home; New World Coming: The 1960s and the Shaping of Global Consciousness; Shifting Borders: American in the Middle East/North Africa; We Will Not Be Silenced: The Academic Repression of Israel's Critics; Righting Injustice: The Case for the Academic Boycott of Israel; and With Stones in Our Hands: Reflections on Racism, Muslims and Empire); social media outlets (Mondoweiss, Al-Shabaka, Jadaliyya); and newspapers and magazines (The Guardian, Al-Fajr; Womanews; Palestine Focus; Voice of Palestinian Women; Christianity and Crisis; Falasteen Al-Thahwra; Al-Hadaf; and Al-Hurriyah). (Full bio)
Dr. Barry Trachtenberg is the Michael R. and Deborah K. Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History and an associate professor of history at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. On Nov. 7, 2017, he testified before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on “Examining Anti-Semitism on College Campuses.”
A scholar of Jewish history and the Nazi Holocaust, Dr. Trachtenberg told the committee: “Legislation such as H.R.6421-Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2016 is not a genuine attempt to contend with actual anti-Semitism, but rather is more correctly understood as a means to quell what are in fact protected acts of speech that are vital and necessary both to the scholarly missions of educational institutions and to the functioning of democratic societies.” He cautioned that “many studies are based on a definition of anti-Semitism that de facto defines criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic….Yet as within American Jewry as a whole, Jewish students hold a wide range of views concerning Israel, from unilaterally supportive to sharply critical.”
Dr. Trachtenberg earned his Ph.D. in history at UCLA and a post-graduate diploma in Jewish Studies at Oxford University. Prior to joining Wake Forest in 2016, he was an associate professor and director of programs in Judaic Studies and Hebrew Studies at the State University of New York’s University at Albany and interim director (2010-2012) of the university’s Center for Jewish Studies. He is the author of the 2018 Bloomsbury Publishing book, The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance.
Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and activist. She is an assistant professor at George Mason University. She is a co-founder/editor of Jadaliyya e-zine and an Editorial Committee member of the Journal of Palestinian Studies. Prior to joining GMU's faculty, she served as legal counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, as a legal advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as the national grassroots organizer and legal advocate at the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, where she helped seed BDS campaigns nationally as well as support the cases brought against two former Israeli officials in U.S. federal courts for alleged war crimes. Most recently, Noura released a pedagogical project on the Gaza Strip and Palestine. The centerpiece of the project is a short multimedia documentary, Gaza in Context, that rehabilitates Israel’s wars on Gaza within a settler-colonial framework. She is also the producer of the short video, Black Palestinian Solidarity. Noura is currently working on a book project tentatively titled, Justice for Some: Law As Politics in the Question of Palestine
Grant Smith is the director of the Washington, DC-based Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep). He is the author of the 2016 book Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby Moves America and Divert! Numec, Zalman Shapiro and the Diversion of U.S. Weapons-Grade Uranium Into the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program (2012).
Smith has also written two histories of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). America’s Defense Line: The Justice Department's Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government and Foreign Agents: AIPAC from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal.
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